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The Silver on the Iron Cross 



By James I. Vance, D. D. 

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A clarion-noted call to conscience and Christian 
unity. 



The Silver on the 
Iron Cross 



By 

JAMES I. VANCE 

Author of " The Young Man Foursquare,'' ''Royal 

Manhood,'" ''Tendency," "The Life of Service t' 

" Life 5 Terminals," **Rise of a Soul" etc. 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 19 19, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 






DEC -3 1919 



New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh ; 75 Princes Street 



©C!.A5868ai 



Dedicated to 
JOE 

My Brother and Team-mate 
Overseas 



Contents 



Foreword 
I. The Indian Head at Ehrenbreit- 

STEIN 



II 



II. The Tulips of Coucy Le Chateau . 19 

III. A Soldier's Grave .... 26 

IV. The Cave Dweller of Juvigny . 34 

V. The Blacksmith of Pothieres . 41 

VI. Holy Communion in Wildcat Hut 48 

VII. A Commission Instead of the Guard 

House. 56 

VIII. Green Apples and Army Chow . . 65 

IX. A Testament or a Bottle of Wine . 78 

X. Internationalism at Nevers . . 88 

XI. The House of Peace in the Crater 

of War . . . . .96 

XII. The Chateau at Claye . . . 105 

XIII. In the German Church at Neuwied 115 



Foreword 

WAR can be camouflaged, but it 
cannot change its nature. War is 
war as iron is iron. No alchemy 
has been discovered that will change iron 
into silver, and no trick of statecraft has 
been invented that can change war into a 
blessing. 

To be sure, war may be made glorious 
when it becomes a fight for freedom or a 
struggle against the forces that would wreck 
the world ; but even then it is not war that 
is glorious, but the passion for freedom in 
the human soul, and the crusade of chival- 
rous spirits against oppression. 

Despite the roll of the drums and the 
pageantry of dress parade, war is war as 
iron is iron, and war's story is told on the 
sodden field where slain men rot; and in 
shell-torn plains and wrecked cities where 
lonely women and orphaned children wait 

9 



10 FOEEWOED 

in broken homes for a day that will not 
return. 

The Hun*s war cross is made of iron, but 
he has edged this iron cross with silver. 
The iron of the cross is still iron and the 
silver remains silver; but the iron and the 
silver touch each other in the iron cross, as 
a bar of sunshine sometimes touches the 
edge of a storm cloud. 

Thus is it with war. There is a silver 
edge to its iron cross. Amid all the unspeak- 
able horrors of the world war there may be 
discovered by the eye that looks for the 
invisible, blessings that are imperishable 
and a glory which even war clouds can- 
not dim. In the chapters which follow there 
is no desire to hide the havoc war has 
wrought, but if we can find a bit of silver 
amid all the iron of these four years of fierce 
fighting, it may help weary hearts to look 
once more toward the morning and press on. 



THE INDIAN HEAD AT EHRENBREIT- 

STEIN 

THE Indian Head was the badge of 
the Second Division, and I saw the 
insignia on the " Gibraltar of the 
Rhine." 

The Second Division may well be proud 
of its record in the world war. It contains 
the famous Fifth and Sixth Regiments of 
United States Marines, whose fighting at 
Chateau Thierry, where the German drive 
was halted and the turning point achieved 
in the conflict with the Hun, is a story of 
heroism that will stir the world as long as 
men cheer courage and honour daring. The 
Second Division has other units whose 
valour is not a whit behind that of the ma- 
rines, and whose fighting record is as illus- 
trious, but whose publicity has not been on 
as extensive a scale. Some idea of what the 

Second Division did at the front may be had 

zi 



12 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

when it is remembered that its casualties 
were over one hundred per cent. 

And the Second Division chose for its 
insignia the head of an American Indian on 
a white star. The feathers are there, and 
the war paint, and the look of a primitive 
man ready for battle. I saw the insignia 
painted by a doughboy on the Kaiser's 
proudest fortress on the Rhine. 

It was at Ehrenbreitstein. Across the 
river is Coblenz, where the Moselle River 
empties into the " wide and winding Rhine." 
Ehrenbreitstein is a fortress crowning a 
great crag that lifts its precipitous sides 
sheer three hundred and eighty-seven feet 
from the banks of the river that flows at its 
feet. It was given by King Dagobert to the 
Archbishop of Treves in 606, destroyed by 
the French in 1801, and rebuilt in 1816-1826 
at a cost of six million dollars. It is called 
the " Gibraltar of the Rhine." 

From its embattlements one looks down 
on sites made famous by the deeds of war 
kings for two thousand years. Yonder a few 
kilometers down the river is Umnitz, where 



INDIAN HEAD AT EHEENBEEITSTEIN 13 

in the year 55 B. c. Julius Caesar built across 
the Rhine the bridge the story of whose 
construction recorded in his " Gallic War " 
has been the plague of many an American 
schoolboy. Some traces of the foundation 
of the ancient span endure. Up the Moselle 
River the Romans had their strongholds in 
the early occupancy of this country. Just 
beneath the fortress is Coblenz, one of the 
most historic cities of the German Empire. 

In this city is the Castor Church. You 
are looking at its four giant towers and roof 
as you stand on the castled heights. The 
church was built in 836 and rebuilt in 1208. 
Charlemagne is said to have worshipped 
within its walls, and there his three grand- 
sons met to parcel out among themselves 
the Holy Roman Empire. Disagreeing, they 
met later at Verdun, where a more pacific 
mood obtained, and to Charles was given 
France ; to Louis, Germany ; and to Lothair, 
the central territory, including the city of 
Rome and embracing what is now Alsace- 
Lorraine, the latter taking its name from 
Lothair. 



14 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CROSS 

In the Castor Church St. Bernard de- 
livered his stirring appeals summoning the 
people to the second crusade. It was from 
Coblenz that a great army started back to 
France to restore Louis to power. Up the 
river a few miles is Konigstuhl, the stone 
where for centuries the German kings have 
been crowned. In front of the Castor 
Church is the monument the French erected 
more than a hundred years ago to com- 
memorate their victory at Moscow, and 
bearing beneath the French inscription the 
laconic statement added by a Russian gen- 
eral after Napoleon's army had been des- 
troyed by the snow and the cold in the 
march back to France : " Seen and approved 
by the Russian commander of the city of 
Coblenz." A doughboy had come along 
and scratched into the stone his " O. K." of 
both the French and the Russian inscrip- 
tions. On the river bank, hard by the 
Coblenz bridge, is a stone marking the spot 
where William the Great and Bismarck met 
in 1870 and celebrated that " triumph of 
diplomacy " which issued in the Franco- 



INDIAN HEAD AT EHEENBREITSTEm 15 

Prussian war, and which these two shrewd 
plotters for power regarded as great because 
by it they persuaded the French that they 
had been insulted and the Germans that 
they had been insulted also, thus setting 
them at each other's throats. 

As a fitting climax to the war landscape 
which lies in the vision of Ehrenbreitstein is 
the equestrian statue of William the Great. 
It is one of the largest in the world. It 
stands there on a point of land just beneath 
you where the Moselle and the Rhine meet, 
and is so distinctly to be seen that you can 
all but catch the expression in the old king's 
face. The bronze figure, planted on a great 
stone, is forty-six feet high. Some idea of 
its size may be had from the fact that the 
horse's hoof measures two and one-half feet 
across. Into the creation of this figure, that 
must have most pleasantly fed the vanity of 
kings, went one million nine hundred thou- 
sand marks. The statue bears the inscrip- 
tion, attributed to the man on the horse: 
" Never will the empire be destroyed if the 
people remain united and loyal." 



16 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CROSS 

But "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." 
The day for kings is dead, and the union 
based on power and camouflaged with a cry 
for loyalty has parted like a rope of sand. 

One afternoon we climbed out of Coblenz 
up to the top of Ehrenbreitstein ; out of Co- 
blenz, now the headquarters of the American 
Army of Occupation ; out of Coblenz, where 
a lad in the uniform of an American soldier 
was on guard before the entrance to the 
palace in which William the Second, Luden- 
dorf and Hindenburg only a few months be- 
fore had their headquarters and planned to 
make German " kultur " rule the world. 
We climbed the steep road which winds and 
winds. As we looked up we could see the 
faces of doughboys in the windows of the 
wall. Then we reached the great stone gate 
by which the fortress is entered, and there 
it was that we saw the sight which told the 
story of how, in a few short months, the 
world had changed, and the tides of power 
which had been running in the Rhine valley 
for two thousand years had reversed them- 
selves and were setting toward freedom. 



INDIAN HEAD AT EHEENBREITSTEIN 17 

For there, over the gateway to the Gibraltar 
of the Rhine, we saw the Indian Head of the 
Second Division of the American Expedi- 
tionary Force. There on the arch, in big 
letters in the colours of our flag, the soldiers 
had painted " iTth U. S. Field Artillery." 
And on the cap-stone, with his feathers as 
fierce as they could ever have been on the 
war trail in the wide wild forests of the 
West, was the bronzed face of the Red Man. 
It told the story of a world change, from au- 
tocracy to democracy, from arrogant privi- 
lege to the rights of the average man, from 
despotism to freedom, from lust for power 
to concern for human welfare, from medie- 
val despotism to the civilization based on 
good-will. 

I lifted my hat to the Red Man from the 
land of the free, and as I did so, I caught 
sight of " Old Glory " flying far above me, 
from the flagstaff at the very summit of 
Ehrenbreitstein ; and I felt that the flag 
was flying there not to make Germany fear, 
but to make her hope. It was the sign and 
pledge that men shall be not slaves, but free. 



18 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

They say that Ehrenbreitstein means 
"Honour's broad stone." With the stars 
and stripes of freedom flying from its sum- 
mit, the great crag was at last worthy of its 
name. 



II 

THE TULIPS OF COUCY LE ChAtEAU 

IT was on a March day, with the chill of 
winter still in the air, that we came 
to Coucy le Chateau. For centuries 
the old town had proudly looked down from 
the high crest of the hill which lifts its steep 
sides sheer out of the surrounding plain. 
Around the escarpment of this hill ran the 
wall with its frowning towers and medieval 
fortifications. Inside this wall was the town 
with a peace time population of three thou- 
sand souls. Outside the walls were the bluffs 
of the hill, empty save for the winding road 
dug into the hillside and leading from the 
plain to the hill-crest Coucy was one of 
those fortified towns, picturesque and his- 
toric, to be found here and there in France, 
standing as the survival of a day that was 
gone and suggestive of the struggles which 
for centuries had made the surrounding plain 

and that region one of the world's great 

19 



20 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

battle-fields. There was a time when Coucy 
was deemed impregnable, and no foe had 
much of a chance against its walls, broad and 
high, and its gates, strong and strategic. 

The people, who dwelt behind the fortifi- 
cations, felt no fear though " a host should 
encamp against them," for a handful of de- 
termined men could garrison the fortress 
against all attacks. 

But things had changed. The big shells 
had hurtled around the heights and dropped 
hell into the homes of the people who for a 
long time had dwelt serenely in the old cha- 
teau town. Coucy was in the crater that for 
the four years of the world war had raged 
in the Soissons area ; and on that bleak day 
in March, 1919, when we climbed the steep 
winding road of the fortress-crowned hill, 
all that was found at the summit was a de- 
serted ruin. It would be difficult to picture 
desolation more complete. Not a house was 
left standing, not a piece of wall behind 
which a forlorn hope could rally and suc- 
cessfully counter. On every side gaunt ruins 
greeted you, doors that hung to nothing. 



THE TULIPS OP COUCY LE CHItEAU 21 

windows that were grinning apertures on 
chaos, piles of stone crushed and crumbling 
in disordered streets, and nowhere life. 
There was not enough left in the old town 
to feed a rat. And yet as we strolled 
through the deserted streets and climbed 
over the debris, there was enough left to 
suggest something of what the place had 
been. Yonder was a street that had been 
lined with shops, here was evidently the 
Hotel de Ville, there was a humble home of 
a peasant, and around the curved street the 
more pretentious residences of the bour- 
geois. 

One found himself thinking of the people 
who had dwelt in Coucy before war had be- 
gun to rain destruction on the doomed town. 
Where were they now? How did they meet 
the terror when it came bursting in upon 
them ? In their hurried flight how much of 
home were they able to carry away? Was 
hope dead in their breasts? Only four years 
ago the town was happy. Children played 
in the streets and the sound of laughter was 
heard. Women talked to each other from 



22 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

the windows and men exchanged the cour- 
tesies of the day as they met and mingled in 
their vocations. But now not a sound in the 
town but the whistle of the wind through 
the ruins ; not a sight but that of the havoc 
made by war. 

The village on the hill-crest was but one 
of many to suffer such a fate; and all such 
places in that devastated area, which was, 
before the war, one of the fairest stretches 
of France, indict war as man's supreme 
folly. 

Will the race learn its lesson? Will men 
climb out of these ruins not with a gun in 
their hands and hate in their hearts, but 
chastened and purified, to seek the civiliza- 
tion that " Cometh not with observation," 
and whose glory is good-will? 

As I wandered amid the desolate ruins of 
Coucy le Ch^-teau I climbed over a bit of 
broken wall, and found myself in what was 
evidently the little garden of one of the 
great homes of the old town. That any 
ground in such a limited area had been left 
for a garden was enough to arrest attention ; 



THE TULIPS OF COUOY LB CHATEAU 23 

but there was the spot of cultivated earth, 
and the sight that greeted my eyes was 
an answer to some of the questions that had 
been perplexing me. For there in the little 
garden behind the broken wall, under the 
shadow of the ruined home, the tulips were 
blooming. It was a perfect bed of the gor- 
geous flowers. They had been planted in a 
circle, and the circle was complete and 
aflame with brilliant colour. War had not 
robbed them of their beauty. It had not 
halted nor lamed them as they marched out 
to meet the spring. They were in full bloom, 
red and white and yellow blossoms; and 
they seemed to say to the ruined town: 
"We have come to bid you hope. We 
would lay our cheeks against the shattered 
rocks and sing of a new day." 

As I looked into the fresh faces of those 
blossoms which were flinging their challenge 
at war, and shouting their defiance of the 
forces that destroy, I said to myself: " Yes, 
the world will learn. It may come slowly, 
but it will come ; for nature is God's method, 
and nature's way is not death, but life ; not a 



24 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

broken wall but a blooming flower; not 
frightful war but blessed peace/* 

Then I climbed up on the broken wall, 
and looking across the unsoiled and unafraid 
faces of the tulips of Coucy le Chateau, I 
seemed to see the ruined town rebuilding. 
The homes were coming back to the old 
fortress, and the people were thronging the 
deserted streets. Coucy was rebuilding, not 
as a medieval fortress, but as a community 
garrisoned with peace; for the flowers in 
the little garden were leading the way to 
spring. And then the town disappeared 
and the vision filled with a thousand towns, 
battered by the shells and scorched by the 
flames of war, to all of which the tulips 
seemed to be bringing the same message of 
triumphant hope. 

The unconquerable forces of the world 
are the mightiest. The sun rises; but no 
eye sees the arm that sets it in its socket in 
the sky. The tide comes in; but no diag- 
nosis of the senses can detect the power be- 
hind the waves which break on the beach* 
The flowers bloom ; but who has found the 



THE TULIPS OF COUCY LE CHATEAU 25 

secret at the heart of a flower? The world 
dries its tears and finds that the morning has 
returned because the same power that 
makes the sun shine and the flowers bloom 
and the tides ebb and flow with life, is eter- 
nally pledged to happiness. 

Coucy le Chateau will grow up out of the 
ruins, and scarred France will see her shell- 
torn fields in grass and grain again. As if 
to proclaim that the tulips on the hilltop 
were not blooming in vain, a little group of 
a dozen French peasants met us as we were 
passing out of the gate of Coucy. There 
was an aged man, some old women, some 
younger women and some children. They 
told us that their homes had been in the old 
town, and they had come back to see if they 
could find a place to live. They will find it, 
somehow they will accomplish the impos- 
sible, for there was a look in the eyes of the 
children, and even in the withered face of 
the old man, akin to the look in the faces of 
the tulips behind the broken wall — a look 
which says that life is stronger than death. 



Ill 

A SOLDIER'S GRAVE 

""^"tr TE have come to help," said an 
%/%/ American general to the French 
on his arrival overseas; "and 
v^hen we return we shall return empty- 
handed, save that we shall take back with us 
our dead." 

But even this has been denied us. We 
cannot take back our dead. Some there are 
whose bodies we cannot even find. They 
were part of that great line of courage and 
valour we flung against the Prussians at 
Chateau Thierry, at St. Mihiel, in the Ar- 
gonne, and in other fights on the long front. 
They fought with such eagerness and aban- 
don, with such disregard of personal safety, 

with such fierce daring and recklessness that 

26 



A SOLDIEE'S GEAVE 27 

as the Hun looked on he said, " The game is 
lost." 

Some of them were buried where they 
fell, in shallow graves, scooped out by the 
roadside to hold all that was mortal of a 
man. Sometimes the deadly shell had done 
its work so well, had so blown to pieces the 
lithe body of some sunny-faced American 
boy, that but the bleeding fragments could 
be interred; and sometimes only the smile 
with which he went into battle was left for 
memory to treasure. Even when the chap- 
lain could recite the service and the body 
could be lowered by comrades to its final 
rest, conditions were such that " earth to 
earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust," was a 
speedy process; and soon the bodies of the 
brave dissolved again into mother earth. 

Hence, France must keep our dead. They 
have become a part of the land for which 
they fought, and these graves of our Ameri- 
can dead in France will unite us forever. 

It was one of these graves that I had set 
out to visit. He was as fine a lad as any 
American home had given to the service. 



28 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

Before war was declared he was keen- 
sighted enough to see what was coming, and 
resigning his chair in a state university, he 
entered the army. In a letter written before 
his enlistment, he had told a close friend of 
his desire to devote his life to some cause 
that would serve human welfare, adding that 
if this meant service overseas he would 
gladly go, but would not expect to return. It 
was as if the hand of destiny had written so 
plainly that he could read his fate before he 
met it. He was a captain. I have thought 
that if there is one commission that carries 
with it a chance to be more than a part of a 
great military machine it is that of captain. 
He comes in close touch with his men. He 
can know them. If he has a heart, he can 
serve them. He can stand between them 
and injustice. He can summon them if he is 
white. He can tie them to him with bonds 
that are stronger than death; and he can 
lead them anywhere, if he is a man. 

My soldier was a captain, and he was a 
man. On the battle front one day the shell 
that bore his name found him, and he died 



A SOLDIER'S GRAVE 29 

where he fell. The news of his death was 
slow in reaching the loved ones at home, 
and came at first in a soldier's letter to a 
mutual friend in a distant city. We hoped 
against hope. It fell to my lot to carry to 
his mother the message from the War De- 
partment which told us that we must cease 
to hope. Her soldier boy was dead. 

In the old church of which he was a mem- 
ber, we gathered on a Sunday afternoon for 
the memorial service. The captain's body 
was not there. How the heart reaches out 
for some physical contact in its hours of 
bereavement! 

" When death inexorable has bereft us, 
When all we can is done, and all is said, 
What other only comfort is there left us. 
What solace save the caring for our dead ? " 

But even this poor comfort was denied the 
broken heart. The grave was somewhere 
across the wide, wide sea, and empty arms 
stretched out in vain for love to fill. 

There were flowers that had been brought 
to the church in his memory, but we could 



30 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

not lay them on his grave. We could only 
send them, with a thought of him, to the 
sick in the hospital after our service was 
over. But it is still something to come be- 
fore God with only the memory of " the 
touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a 
voice that is still." Thus we came that 
day to the old church, and thus many similar 
groups have gathered when the message 
came that told of the supreme sacrifice. 

As the bugler in the tower of the church 
sounded taps at the close of the service, we 
slowly passed out, but the distance to a 
soldier's grave in France seemed shorter, 
for He who watches between us and ours 
while we are absent one from another had 
comforted His people. 

Is it strange that when I came to France, 
I wanted to visit a soldier's grave? It was 
not easy to find. General Records had no 
record; but Providence helped, and on the 
train I met an army officer who told me 
where to find the spot where the captain 
sleeps. 

We drove for miles across the battle-fields 



A SOLDIEE»S GEAVE 31 

to reach the little American cemetery lying 
on the sunny summit of a hill, where four 
hundred and ten graves, each with a little 
cross and a metal plate to tell the story, 
make sacred for America the soil of France. 

At the gate a flag of the homeland was 
flying, and just inside the gate at the third 
grave in the first row, I found him. It was 
a row of captains* graves. I paused at his 
number, 211, and read his name on the 
metal plate. Then before I knew it, a mist 
was swimming before my eyes ; and I found 
myself saying over and over again, under 
my breath : " God bless the boy ! " 

Was it a prayer for the dead? No, I was 
not asking God to do something for the 
captain He had not already done. " Blessed 
are the dead that die in the Lord." He had 
died thus. When he fell, it was to find his 
Saviour's arms around him, for thus he had 
gone into battle. When we said good-bye 
before he sailed, I had pointed up and said : 
" Remember," and with a smile he had said 
to his pastor : " I will not forget." I was 
not afraid that he had forgotten. When the 



32 THE SILVBE ON THE lEON CROSS 

heart leaped to the lip with " God bless the 
boy ! " it was not a prayer but a benediction. 

We covered the grave with spring flow- 
ers; and then the friends who had come 
with me gathered around the captain's 
grave, with uncovered heads, as I offered a 
prayer to the God of brave men. 

Then under the open sky, on the hillside, 
beside a soldier's grave, we thanked God 
for him and for all like him who had laid 
down life or placed it in jeopardy for a 
holy cause. We commended to God anew 
His children back home to whom the bit of 
earth where we stood was consecrated 
ground. Quietly we turned away and went 
back by the battered towns, by the piles of 
ammunition along the roadside, by the war 
tanks stranded in the fields where the battle 
left them, back by the tools of war and the 
signs of the ruin it marks ; but we went past 
all this feeling that the graves where sleep 
the bodies of our soldier dead are shrines. 
" Greater love hath no man than this, that 
a man lay down his life for his friends." 
Some day a grateful country will build an 



A SOLDIERS GEAVE 33 

enduring memorial to her sons who fell 
in the world war; but already they are re- 
membered, and they can never be forgotten. 

" What need have we for cenotaph or column, 
For mural stone or window's blazoned flame, 
When all our hearts are sanctuaries solemn, 
Wherein we hold enshrined our hero's name ? " 



IV 

THE CAVE DWELLER OF JUVIGNY 
"' ■ ^HERE is no lock in France that a 



T 



franc will not open." This is the 
view some Americans are bring- 
ing home of our Ally across the sea. Many 
of our soldiers are unfortunately returning 
convinced that the French have disgrace- 
fully profiteered on America and Americans. 
They will tell you that the French shop- 
keepers have one price for the natives and a 
higher price for the same article when pur- 
chased by an American; that the French 
palm is always extended and when exam- 
ined is found to be an itching palm; and 
that all barriers yield to a sufficiently sub- 
stantial consideration. They point to the 
big sum the French Government has 
charged America for the use of its rails and 

for concessions incident to the handling of 

34 



THE CAVE DWELLEE OF JUVIGNY 35 

troops and supplies. They will remind you 
that not even the body of an American sol- 
dier, slain in defense of France, can sleep 
in peace until the grave has been paid for 
in cold cash. 

In the face of all this, the doughboy finds 
it hard to believe that France is a nation of 
ideaHsts. He knows that America entered 
the war with altruistic motives; that she 
has spent billions of money, sent millions of 
men, and made preparations for war on 
such a colossal scale that even the unim- 
aginative Hun was convinced the game 
was lost All this America did, not for her- 
self, but for a nation that was being pressed 
by her enemies to the danger line. Amer- 
ica's motive was not lust for power or ter- 
ritory, but a desire to help the Allies in 
their struggle for freedom. 

Under such circumstances, the doughboy 
feels that France should have given him 
chivalrous treatment, and the French peo- 
ple should have declined to line their purse 
at his expense. Is his estimate of France 
fair? Before allowing his judgment to 



36 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

harden, there are some things to remember. 
It is perhaps unfortunate that the dough- 
boy's contact has been with a class of the 
French people in whom the habit of thrift 
is easily mistaken for greed. The French 
peasant hoards his small earnings. He has 
no desire to be rich, but he does cling to his 
small piece of ground, and looks and longs 
for the day when it may be rounded out. 
He is in no position to be generous, and if 
he should seem ungenerous or even profit- 
eering, let his victim think of the genera- 
tions of privation and struggle that lie 
behind this centime-serving peasant. One 
should also not forget that while France 
has profiteered on the American soldier, 
America did the same back home. Prices 
soared, hotel charges leaped up, room rents 
became exorbitant wherever a camp or can- 
tonment was located in the States. If our 
own people went wrong, let us not be too 
hard on the French. 

A soldier writing to his father about the 
way the people, among whom the troops 
lived, profiteered said: 



THE CAVE DWELLER OF JUVIGNY 37 

" They fleece us pitilessly ; the price of 
everything is exorbitant; in all the dealings 
that we have with them they treat us more 
like enemies than friends. Their cupidity is 
unequalled; money is their God; virtue, 
honour seem nothing to them compared to 
the precious metal. I do not mean that there 
are no estimable people whose character is 
equally noble and generous— there are many ; 
but I speak of the nation in general. 

" Money is the prime mover of all their 
actions; they think only of means to gain it; 
each is for himself, and none is for the public 
good." 

But this is not a letter from France in 
1918, about the way the French treated their 
American allies. It was a letter from 
America in 1782, about the way the Ameri- 
cans treated their French allies. 

That the French Government has been 
liberally paid for certain concessions is 
undoubtedly true ; but we were able to pay 
and France needed the money. France's 
resources had been drained by the long 
war, and her treasury was in no condition 
to play up spectacular generosity. It would 
have been a sorry day for a rich nation like 



38 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

America to have taxed her exhausted ally 
for entertainment. America had too much 
self-respect to let France pay her bills; too 
much chivalry herself to ride free trains to 
the battle front. 

There is, hov^ever, something else to be 
remembered, whenever we are tempted to 
condemn the cupidity of the land of Lafay- 
ette. France has suffered. She has paid 
such a price for freedom as to shame and 
refute every charge against her honour. She 
heads the list in the percentage of enlist- 
ments and casualties; and it is across her 
bosom that war's red ruin has ploughed its 
deepest furrows. 

It was in the little village of Juvigny that 
I saw the picture that stamped this on my 
imagination. Juvigny was one of those 
little towns in the war zone played upon 
alternately by the guns of both friend and 
foe. It had been shot to pieces, and was 
battered beyond recognition. I stopped 
one day to look at the ruins of Juvigny; but 
what I saw was not a town beaten down to 
its foundations, but a human being, battered 



THE CAVE DWELLEE OF JUVIGNY 39 

by adversity, creeping out of a hole in 
the side of the hill, stooped and wrinkled 
and feeble; carrying on her shoulders the 
burdens of years, and on her heart a weight 
of woe which words are too empty to ex- 
press. Once she had lived in a stone house 
there on the hill; now she burrowed into a 
hole she had dug for herself in the side of 
that hill. This was her " house by the side 
of the road." It was near the spot she 
loved best, and she could at least be close to 
the ruins of her former home. She was not 
coming out of her cave in the bank by the 
roadside to beg, for her load was on her 
back as well as on her heart. She was com- 
ing out to work. Broken, bent, despoiled, 
harassed, her spirit was unconquerable. 
She could still carry on! 

As she tottered with her bundle down the 
path to the place where she worked, I said : 
" There goes the soul of France-invincible." 
And when I have heard men say that France 
is mercenary, that her people are degen- 
erate, I have thought of the cave dweller of 
Juvigny. People there are in France who 



40 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

deserve all the resentment the American 
soldier has justly felt because of treatment 
not to be expected at the hands of those 
he came to help. But let the doughboy 
forget the shopkeepers of France and re- 
member the soldiers; let him forget the 
itching palms and remember the faces 
seamed with sorrow; let him forget Paris 
and think of Juvigny; let him forget the 
courtesan, and think of an aged woman 
peering out of a doorway dug in the mud 
walls of a bank by the roadside. In her 
face was the look which kings have seen 
and have not slept. 



V 

THE BLACKSMITH OF POTHIERES 

HE was a big six-footer from the 
Tennessee mountains, with a 
Southern drawl in his voice and a 
manner that was languid but not hesitant. 
He was putting new shoes on the hind end 
of an army mule. We were turning a cor- 
ner into the narrow street on which the 
company's shop was located and where the 
big Tennessean was endeavouring to fit the 
mule for service in the " Democratic Army." 
Just as we turned the corner the oath 
slipped out, and the mule was described in 
language sufficiently picturesque to classify 
him. Hardly had the oath passed into his- 
tory when the blacksmith saw his captain 
and the preacher who was holding forth 
nightly in " Wildcat Hut " turn the corner. 
Gently he dropped the mule's hind foot, 
quietly walked to the beast's head, and tak- 

41 



42 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

ing hold of one of his long ears, said in low 
tones which he did not expect us to hear, 
but which we were fortunate enough to 
catch : " If you don't behave yourself, you 
are going to make this preacher hear me 
cuss." Was he profane? Did the oath on 
his lips mean there was no respect for God 
in his heart? Did the fact that he softly 
swore at the mule mean that he lacked those 
finer traits of character which are supposed 
to be built on reverence? 

Yes, there is much profanity in the army. 
You had best stay away if your ideas of 
propriety are too stiff to stand it. But is 
this profanity to be judged by the orthodox 
standard? There is good authority for the 
statement that " as a man thinketh in his 
heart, so is he." Of course there must be 
no apology for the sin of taking God's name 
in vain. Profanity under no circumstances 
can ever be regarded as a harmless habit. 
Nevertheless a deed takes on character from 
its motive, and the profanity of the army 
should not be passed on apart from its 
environment. 



THE BLACKSMITH OP POTHIEEES 43 

The mule is there, and by the mule I 
mean conditions that are exasperating, that 
rasp the nerves and try the soul and vex 
the spirit. There must be a safety valve, 
and the one which many a soldier uses is 
located in his vocabulary. Often he feels 
as the old Roman v^ho said : " If I can't bend 
the gods above, I'll rouse all hell below," 
and he proceeds to rouse. Before condemn- 
ing the soldier too severely for his oaths, 
remember his provocations. They are 
many and bitter. And before them the old 
maid code of propriety goes to the bow- 
wows. 

One night, in a sermon, I took the boys 
to task for their language, and the next 
morning they took me down to the corral 
where the mules were kept, and said: 
" Preacher, you don't understand what we 
are up against. These mules have been 
brought up on cussing. They don't under- 
stand any other language. We have to 
swear at them to get results. That mean 
looking mule yonder is * Old Dynamite.' 
It takes an hour and a half every morn- 



44 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

ing to get him hooked to the wagon. We 
have to fasten one end of a chain around 
his neck and throw the other end over 
the limb of a tree and hoist his front feet 
from the ground and leave him hanging 
there for three-quarters of an hour before 
he will let us come near him with the 
harness.'* I had to admit that *' circum- 
stances alter cases." 

Frequently the army man looks upon 
profanity as a means to an end. One day a 
young sergeant, who had come to talk with 
me about the better things of life, who said 
that the war had strengthened his faith in 
Christ, and who declared that he was going 
back to America to work in the church more 
actively than he had done before, admitted 
that at times he used profane language. He 
did not try to excuse himself, and he stated 
most positively that when he returned 
home, he would leave the practice behind 
him. " But," he said, " I do not mean to 
be profane when I use such language in the 
army. It is merely in order to accomplish 
results." 



THE BLACKSMITH OF POTHIEEES 45 

He was probably wrong in his estimate 
of the value of profanity as a getter of re- 
sults. Some of the most capable officers I 
have known have been outspoken in their 
declaration that it is not necessary to curse 
men in order to control them. The best 
comes out, not under the lash of an oath, 
but under the spell of an example. Then 
too, along with the breakdown of profanity 
as a result getter, one must reckon on the 
peril which comes from the tenacity of 
habit. An old soldier declined election to 
the office of elder in his church. To a 
friend, in private, he explained that while 
an army officer he had used profane lan- 
guage; and that although years had passed 
and he had long since reformed his speech, 
still in moments of severe provocation the 
old oaths would come leaping to his lips to 
shame and confound him. 

The soldier who has become a swearing 
man will perhaps some day discern that 
trunk lines have been built in his nerves for 
such words, and that it is not always easy 
to throw the switch; but that the use of 



46 THE SILVEE ON THE IRON CEOSS 

such language is to be regarded as the sign 
of a bad heart does not always follow. His 
profanity is playing with fire, but it is not 
arson. Attention has been called to the 
fact that while profanity is so common 
among American soldiers, it is rarely heard 
among the French. What is the explana- 
tion? It can hardly be due to any greater 
reverence the Frenchmen entertain for re- 
ligion. Indeed it may be suspected that 
the materialistic Frenchman has so utterly 
cast God out of his processes of thought 
that he does not even appeal to Him in a 
profane oath. Profanity is the debris of a 
religious nature. The profanity of the 
American soldier is no sign of a nature that 
repudiates rehgion. It is the flotsam and 
jetsam of a faith that has grown careless. 

What is said of profanity must also be 
said of other things in the indictment against 
a soldier's morals. One must remember 
what these men have been up against. 
They have not been going to Sunday school. 
There in the trenches amid the mud and 
the dead, amid the shrieking shells and the 



THE BLACKSMITH OF POTHIEEES 47 

rattle of machine-gun fire, amid the awful 
carnage and sickening horrors of war, they 
have been in hell. Is it strange that they 
should come out with some of its filth upon 
them? But be patient and do not be too 
severe. Cheers for them, that they have 
done as well as they have! 

A fine lad from the plains of North Da- 
kota, who said he wanted to go home and 
run a farm for a living and help boys become 
good men for a life-work, said to me one 
day on the banks of the Rhine : " Is the man 
back home who swears one oath, and is kept 
from swearing more for fear of what people 
may think of him, any better than the man 
over here who swears all his oaths because 
he does not care what people may think of 
him?" 

As I passed the blacksmith of Pothieres 
that morning I felt, notwithstanding his 
words to the mule, that I was in the pres- 
ence of a man who had more real reverence 
for sacred things than many who bow in 
churches. 



VI 

HOLY COMMUNION IN WILDCAT HUT 

IT was a muggy night outside, such as 
the climate of southern France pro- 
duces in superabundance along to- 
ward the close of winter. The rain was 
falling, the streets were streams of sloppy- 
mud, the night was dark, and the men were 
homesick. 

They called themselves " the lost Divi- 
sion." They had trained at Camp Jackson, 
had come overseas the preceding August, 
and part of the Division had been lucky 
enough to get into action during the last 
days of the Argonne. There they had given 
a good account of themselves and shown 
that all they needed was a chance to prove 
that the wildcat on their left shoulders was 
not an empty decoration. 

But the Eighty-First was settling into the 

stolid conviction that they had been for- 

48 



HOLY COMMUNION IN WILDCAT HUT 49 

gotten. They were not on the list of the 
units named for return during the four 
ensuing months. They had heard that al- 
though they had been in France over six 
months and were wearing their first chevron 
of gold, a telegram had recently been sent 
from the War Department in Washington 
to their old training quarters at Camp Jack- 
son ordering the Eighty- First to demobilize. 
Why should they not regard themselves as 
" the lost Division " ? 

To seal their doom, a private had dreamed 
that one day, long after the war was ended, 
General Pershing, grown to be an old man, 
was sitting in his home in America, with his 
little granddaughter on his knee, who said, 
" Grandfather, where is the Eighty- First? '* 
After some reflection, he replied, " Why, 
there was an Eighty- First, wasn't there? 
I must go back to France and see if I can 
find it." After wandering around France 
for some time, he finally came upon an aged 
man in frayed and ragged uniform. It 
proved to be General Bailey. The cat on 
his shoulder was worn almost beyond rec- 



60 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

ognition. General Pershing asked him, 
" Where is the Eighty- First? " to which the 
old man shook his head and replied, " Je ne 
comprends pas" 

I had been speaking to the men of the 
318th Field Artillery all week, and on the 
closing Sunday night of the meetings we 
had arranged for a communion service. The 
chaplain told me it had been a long time 
since they had been able to hold such a 
service. Indeed, many of the men had not 
partaken of the symbols of the Saviour*s pas- 
sion since leaving the home church in 
America. 

The hut was a long, low, ugly building 
squatting on marshy ground. It had for- 
merly been used for a mess hall, but had 
been moved and changed to adapt itself to 
the uses of a Y hut. In the corner of one 
end was the canteen, and across the other 
end was the platform on which " Y events " 
were staged. Two little stoves toiled to 
impart a suggestion of warmth to the 
French chill which is always in the air dur- 
ing the winters in France. When the Delco 



HOLY COMMUmON IN WILDCAT HUT 61 

system could get gas, the hut was lighted 
with a few feeble incandescent lamps. On 
the front, in red letters, hung the sign, 
" Wildcat Hut," and there, on that rainy- 
night, we gathered for a soldiers' celebration 
of the death of Christ. 

We had to content ourselves with the 
rudest furnishings for the Holy Supper. 
The communion table was a rough box in 
which canteen supplies had been shipped. 
The " service " consisted of a white porce- 
lain plate and two glass tumblers. The 
wine was in the bottle in which it had been 
bought, and the bread was a loaf which I 
took to the canteen and, with my pocket 
knife, cut into small squares. All this was 
covered with a clean white towel. 

The hut was packed with men, many of 
them, unable to get seats, standing in the far 
end from the platform. The Delco system 
began to fail, and as the meeting started, 
went out of business altogether. Then a 
few candles were placed on the window 
sills, and these served, not so much to light 
the room, as to cast shadows. 



52 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CEOSS 

When I arose to speak, in the dimly 
lighted hall, I could see the outlines of the 
men in the rear of the room, but not their 
faces. I reminded them that the Holy Sup- 
per had first been observed at night; and 
that, while we met in an army hut with none 
of the grandeur of a great church around 
us, and that while our communion table 
was a rough box and our communion serv- 
ice cheap dishes borrowed from the " mess," 
we must not forget that the Saviour, Whose 
love we were to recall, was Himself born in 
a stable and cradled in a manger; and that 
the plain and cheap surroundings of our 
communion service there in Wildcat Hut 
might make all the more impressive the 
spiritual side of the sacrament. I expressed 
the hope that Christ would become so real 
to us in that service which was to be so 
empty of all external appeal, that in the days 
to come, as memory dwelt upon the night, 
it would stand out as a great hour in the 
life of the soul. 

They sang " Rock of Ages." I thought 
of what those boys had been through, of 



HOLY COMMUNION IN WILDCAT HUT 53 

what they had given up, of the long days 
and weary weeks there in the mud of 
France, of how heart-sick they were for the 
homes overseas, of how more than seventy 
thousand of their comrades were sleeping 
the long sleep in the little graves under the 
wooden crosses scattered throughout the 
devastated area. Then, as I heard them 
sing, 

" E'en though it be a cross 
That raiseth me," 

it seemed to me that I saw the light of a 
new glory in some of their faces. I don't 
suppose they were thinking of their hard- 
ships. I like to feel they were thinking of 
His cross. And it may have been only my 
imagination, but there was something in the 
hut that night that helped one to see the 
unseen. God seemed not far away. The 
eternal was casting its spell upon us. 

The message was on " Being Crucified 
with Christ," and the Scripture, Galatians 
2 : 20. 

After the address, the men were asked to 



54 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CROSS 

come forward and line tip in front of the 
platform to receive the emblems. From 
here and there and yonder, in the dimly lit 
room, they arose and quietly came forward, 
taking their places in a formation that meant 
loyalty to Christ. 

It was a heroic test to commune under 
such circumstances. It must be done be- 
fore men who hate hypocrisy as they hate 
nothing else, as well as before the God 
Whose eye seeth the heart. 

Then, as I walked down the line, uttering 
the old words of the institution and giving to 
each man the emblems of his Saviour's pas- 
sion, the mean surroundings and cheap fur- 
nishings of Wildcat Hut seemed trans- 
figured. No stately cathedral was more 
glorious than the place, for He Whose face 
is heaven had come to His soldiers, far from 
home and loved ones, and made them feel 
the nearness of those who are one in Him. 

Many have been the times I have min- 
istered at the Table, but that night, when 
those soldiers of our country stood with 
bowed heads in Wildcat Hut and remem- 



HOLY COMMUNION IN WILDCAT HUT 56 

bered Him Who died on the cross for them, 
can never be forgotten, for there in the line 
among those who took the emblems of 
Christ's passion from my hand was my own 
son. 



VII 

A COMMISSION INSTEAD OF THE 
GUARD HOUSE 

HE was a Second Lieutenant. We 
had met that morning for the first 
time, and we may never meet again. 
It was on a railroad train making its poky- 
schedule through the devastated area of 
France. He wanted some one to talk to, 
and when there is nothing better available, 
a preacher who listens sympathetically 
easily finds what beats beneath a soldier's 
jacket. 

And so he told me about his sweetheart 
back in the States. He was dead anxious 
to get home, and soon after his arrival there 
would be a wedding, and then Eden would 
start all over again. As he talked about her, 

I could see how that girl had followed him 

56 



A COMMISSION 67 

overseas, how her face had floated before 
him in the long days and lonely nights, how 
her voice had called to him when the way 
was rough and the world was hard, and 
how the thought of her had been his shield 
and buckler in the struggle with temptation, 

" Has not the thought of that girl back 
home, who has promised to be your wife, 
helped you to play the man over here? " I 
said. " She has," he quickly and eagerly 
answered. " She has given me a commis- 
sion instead of the guard house." 

There, in a word, he had painted the pic- 
ture of the influence of the women back 
home on our men in this war. There has 
been no sweeter, holier, diviner influence. 
It has been God's good hand to keep them 
from evil and save them from despair. 

One night, at the close of a meeting in a 
hut that had been an old wine house, a big, 
broad-shouldered chap elbowed his way 
through the crowd up to the front, to shake 
hands and tell me he was from the South. 
As we stood talking of the state we both 
love, he said, " I have a wife over there. 



68 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

and a little baby I have never seen." 
"Well, Captain," I said, "when you have 
been tempted over here, has the thought of 
the wife and the baby over there steadied 
you?" "It has saved me," he replied, as 
he gripped my hand good-bye. 

So one might pass down the line and find 
the same story repeating itself over and 
over again. There is no diviner influence 
than that of a good woman, and there is no 
more satanic influence than that of a bad 
woman. The American soldier has felt 
both. 

He has had to face the courtesan-life of 
France and face it under circumstances 
which made victory over lust the achieve- 
ment of a superman. He has found the 
door not only open but the invitation in- 
sistent to break away from moral restraints. 
He has been plunged into an atmosphere 
saturated with indulgence. He has been 
thrown into an environment which made 
desire the only ethical criterion of conduct. 
He has come out of the trenches, in some 
cases, to find that the authorities supposed 



A COMMISSION 69 

to protect him against sexual indulgence 
had made provision for its gratification. Is 
it any wonder that some fell? Is it not a 
miracle that any stood? Yet many, prob- 
ably the majority, did stand, and the ex- 
planation of the miracle was the influence of 
a pure woman back home. It may have 
been his mother, it may have been his wife 
or his sister, it may have been his sweet- 
heart; but she was for him the incarnation 
of all that is finest in life; and when the 
devil of temptation showed his leering face, 
instead of yielding, the soldier smote him 
full. 

The women in America have played a 
great part in the winning of the war. They 
have nursed patriotism in the souls of the 
men at home. They have sent the boys 
away to the war, smiling as they kissed 
them good-bye; and then they have gone 
home to cry in the night when none but God 
could see their tears. They have been at 
the front *in every great undertaking at 
home for the winning of the war. They 
have worked and prayed, and hid their 



60 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CROSS 

heartaches and kept on smiling; but they 
have done more than this. They have been 
perhaps the most potent force in maintain- 
ing the morale of the army. They have 
stretched unseen hands across the wide sea 
and, with the resistless might of their un- 
conscious influence over American man- 
hood, they have smitten the Hun. They 
were there in the courage of every soldier 
who thought of his sweetheart and carried 
on ; of every son of a good mother who said 
to himself as he went over the top, " I know 
she is thinking about me." 

" I have been true to my wife all the 
while I have been over here," said a soldier 
as he passed by in the line of men with 
whom I was shaking hands. The light of 
heaven was in his face when he said it, and 
a look which told of battle and of victory 
too. 

The American woman makes a fatal 
blunder who sufifers her ideals to sag, as 
the boys come home; who imagines that 
the way to please the man who has been 
in France is to do as the French do. The 



A COMMISSION 61 

American soldier may tolerate cigarette 
smoking in a Mademoiselle, but he looks 
for something different in the girl back 
home. He has seen the world and he re- 
turns to America with a discovery. The 
thing he used to take as a matter of course 
and, sometimes, because of its strictness, 
resent, he now adores. He returns with an 
enthusiasm for the purity of American 
womanhood, and the sanctity of American 
family life. Woe to the woman who thinks 
to win him by cheapening herself. 

Half an hour ago I paused on the deck 
of the transport that was taking us back to 
America to listen to a group of these sol- 
diers singing. They were a bunch of husky 
chaps, bronzed and hardened, smiling and 
happy. They had seen service, for they 
belonged to the Rainbow Division. I sat 
down beside them, and took from their lips 
the song. Here it is : — 

" I want a girl just like the girl 
That married dear old Dad ; 
She was a pearl, and the only girl. 
That Daddy ever had ; 



62 THE SILYEE ON THE lEON CROSS 

Dear old-fashioned girl, with heart so true, 
One who loved no other one but you ; 
I want a girl just like the girl 
That married dear old Dad." 

America has things to learn, and she is 
learning them; but the American woman 
has no need to go to school to the small 
vices of the Continent. Society is largely 
w^hat v^^omen make it. What a man thinks 
of a woman is largely responsible for his 
conduct, and if womanhood sags, the world 
is lost. 

The soldier does not come home to ask 
the women of his country to efface them- 
selves. He is willing for them to have their 
rights, and proud of their leadership; but 
he will be grievously disappointed should 
they cease to inspire him. He will look to 
a woman for his ideals, and if she has fallen 
below him, she will find that her power is 
gone. 

How our boys have worshipped at the 
shrine of their loves during the dragging 
months of the war! It was about the only 
clean thing left them. They have marched 



A COMMISSION 63 

in the rain and the cold; they have slept in 
the mud and lived with the dead ; they have 
gone without food and pay ; they have been 
through hell; but something holy has gone 
all the way with them. It has been the 
thought of a woman they loved. In the 
darkness, her face has floated out before 
them. In the silence of the night, they 
have talked to her, and in their seasons of 
homesickness, the keenest longing has been 
to see her once more face to face. 

The long months and dreary days of the 
war and the more trying period of enforced 
inaction and dead monotony following the 
signing of the armistice, these men endured. 
They endured it because they felt that it 
must end. Ever and again they found them- 
selves saying, " What of the night? '* They 
cursed the long night; but something said, 
" The morning cometh," and the morning 
for which they longed and waited was the 
daybreak of the homeland. In their pic- 
ture of dawn was ever the face of the woman 
who was waiting. " She has given me a 
commission instead of the guard house." 



64 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

Let her see to it there is no disappointment 
when the boy comes home. 

" When the great red dawn is shining, 
And the waiting hours are passed ; 
When the tears of night are ended. 
And I see the day at last; 
I will come down a road of sunshine, 
To a heart that is fond and true ; 
When the great red dawn is shining, 
Back to home, back to love, back to you ! " 



VIII 

GREEN APPLES AND ARMY CHOW 

THEY were two doughboys at 
Montabaur, the headquarters of 
the First Division in the Army of 
Occupation, east of the Rhine. They were 
discussing the two permanent and continu- 
ous themes of conversation in the army — 
chow and getting home. They were 
walking just ahead of me and this is what 
I heard : " I guess we'll get home in time 
to sleep on the grass and eat green apples," 
said one; to which his comrade replied: 
" Take it from me, you had better let green 
apples alone, unless you want war in your 
stomach." " Go 'way," replied the first. 
"Any stomach that can stand this army chow 
won't have any trouble with green apples ! " 
Thus did the doughboy carry on. He 

6S 



66 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CROSS 

says they call him " doughboy ** because he 
is " the flour of the army." We have come 
to apply the name not only to the Infantry, 
but, as a general term, to designate the 
American soldier; and the army made up 
of these men is the flower of all the armies 
of the world. 

The doughboy is a good sport. He lights 
up the rough stretches of his army life with 
a kind of grim but genial humour. He can 
make a joke of anything, even of death it- 
self. He goes over the top with a smile, 
and he shouts his defiance at the shrieking 
shells which hurtle through the sky, even 
though it may mean the final gasp for him; 
" Go it, old piano box ! " " Hurry up, old 
trolley car ! " " Good-morning, Mister Whiz 
Bang!" 

The most solemn things have their hu- 
morous side for him. " There is a man in 
this army to whom I owe ten dollars, and 
he has not been killed yet," said a doughboy 
in tones of deep disgust. 

" When one of those big fellows falls near 
you and you fail to fall with it, your folks 



GEEEN APPLES AND AEMY CHOW 67 

might as well get ready to collect the in- 
surance," said another. 

A soldier, who sat down to rest his weary 
feet on the steps of the statue of WiUiam 
the Great at Coblenz, looked up and shook 
his fist at the old man on horseback, saying, 
" Damn you ! You are the fellow who 
raised his son to be a soldier." 

A doughboy, who said he had gotten some 
real American ice-cream in Paris, was asked 
how much it cost him, and laconically re- 
plied, " I almost got some for two francs." 
An indignant and disgusted buck private 
declared that " the Germans must have been 
fighting for powder, certainly not for those 
French hills, which, so far as he was con- 
cerned, they might have if they would let 
him leave them." 

There was a period when conditions in 
the camp at St. Aignan were very bad, in 
fact execrable; but the doughboy whistled 
down the wind, swallowed his discomforts, 
and took out his grouch against the place 
by calling St. Aignan " Camp Agony." 
It is when he dwells on what he will do 



68 THE SILYEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

when at last he is home again and free from 
army servitude that the doughboy's sense 
of humour gets most active. One man said 
that when he got home he was going to 
hang his blue denim suit on the wall and 
write under it, " Lest we forget." 

Another said that the only part of his 
army equipment he wanted to take home 
with him was his dog tent; and when asked 
what he proposed to do with it, said, " I 
want to set it up in the kitchen. After 
breakfast, I want to crawl under it and go 
to sleep, and the same thing after dinner 
and supper. After I have done this for six 
weeks, my wife may give her orders and 
ril be ready for anything." 

They say, " the French fought for home, 
the English for glory, and the Americans 
for souvenirs." In line with this one soldier 
vSaid, " The only souvenirs I intend taking 
home are a can of * bully beef ' and a pack- 
age of * hard tack.' I expect to set them up 
in front of me and say, ' Bully Beef, atten- 
tion! Hard Tack, mark time! — and watch 
me eat roast chicken ! ' " 



GEEEN APPLES AND AEMY CHOW 69 

Their imaginations perform prodigiously 
as they picture the meals they expect to 
have prepared at home as a substitute for 
the hated army chow. " Boys, think of 
eating pumpkin pie until it stops tasting 
good." " I am going to order a beefsteak 
a foot and a half long and two inches thick 
and have it served with mushrooms." 

They made many jokes about that pest of 
the trenches, the " cootie." In one unit, an 
order of knighthood was instituted with a 
cootie on the coat of arms, and above it, the 
legend, " Cootie Mit Uns," in emulation of 
the Kaiser. In another the Cootie Derby 
was run, under strict rules, jack-straws of 
the same length being the race-course, and 
only home-grown cooties being allowed to 
enter. 

With such gentle humour did our brave 
boys try to light up a hard lot during those 
long months overseas. Even in the trenches 
and the hospital this spirit did not desert 
them. A good meaning woman, who said 
that she wanted to brighten up things for 
the sick soldiers, stopped beside a cot and 



70 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

said to the doughboy, " Would you Hke me 
to wash your face?" "Yes," he said, "if 
you want to. It has been washed six times 
already this morning." 

This front of cheerfulness, this tendency 
to make light of the rough side of army life, 
takes on a quality of heroism when one 
keeps in mind what these men went 
through. No brush can paint the pic- 
ture; no words can adequately tell the 
story. 

The things he had to stand, outside the 
combat activities, were trying enough. He 
was always standing something, somewhere. 
He got nothing without standing in line. 
It was everlastingly a line up. There he 
stood, shifting first from one foot to the 
other, slowly moving up, patiently waiting 
his turn, cheerfully biding his time to get 
a chance to buy a package of cigarettes or a 
box of chocolates, or receive his army chow. 
Some one has said that the favourite for- 
mation of the American Army is the chow 
line. 

Then there were the many things which 



GREEN APPLES AND ARMY CHOW 71 

are incident to existence when a man loses 
his personality and becomes part of a great 
military machine. Men used to command 
at home must take their detail at the most 
menial duties. It was most democratic, to 
be sure, but it took big men to take such 
things with serenity. When the fighting 
days came, how the glory of these sunny 
souled boys from the New World of the 
West shone out ! 

In one unit of two hundred and forty- 
eight, there were three hundred and sixty- 
three killed, so rapidly were replacements 
made into casualties. Lieutenant K., of the 
18th Infantry, decorated with the Dis- 
tinguished Service Cross, told me that in 
the fighting in the Argonne, he had seen 
men who had lain wounded for five days on 
the battle-field, before food and attention 
reached them. The chaplain of the 26th 
Regiment told me that their men went four 
days on one meal in the fighting at Soissons. 
At times men marched with their feet on the 
ground, slept in the mud and rain, faced 
and endured hardships that need not be 



72 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON OEOSS 

recited here, and still were able to jolly 
each other and make jokes about the situa- 
tion. 

This does not mean that they were con- 
tented with their lot — far from it. The 
doughboy is a knocker, and he is lonesome 
without his grouch. His grouch, however, 
is just a sign that he is healthy. Had he 
ceased to complain of conditions, there 
would have been good ground for alarm 
lest either his morale or his health was 
breaking down. 

He is a great performer as a critic, and 
the things he needs most and likes best are 
the victims of some of his most vicious 
criticisms. The favourite marks for his 
shafts are the Second Lieutenants, the Mili- 
tary Police, and the Y. M. C. A. The stalest 
joke in the army is : "Who won the war? " — 
the answer to which is, " The M. P. and the 
Y." One cannot attend an army show 
without hearing some sally at this trinity of 
heroes in the doughboy's joking repertory. 
He will ridicule the Y and then he will use 
it. He will crowd its huts to overflowing. 



GEEEN APPLES AND AEMY CHOW 73 

He will throw down his pack and his first 
remark will be, " Where is that damn Y? " 
There can be no doubt that the Y fre- 
quently deserved the lashing it received at 
the hands of the men it was endeavouring to 
serve, for it was not always able to do for 
them what they needed and it had planned. 
It received only forty per cent of its sup- 
plies, and it had only thirty per cent, of its 
transportation ; but even thus handicapped, 
it did sixty per cent, of its job. 

When the perspective has adjusted itself, 
and the doughboy tries to give credit where 
it is due, he will have only unstinted praise 
for an organization that was serving him 
with sixty-five hundred secretaries in France 
when the armistice was signed; that main- 
tained fifteen hundred and seven centres in 
the A. E. F. and thirteen hundred and fifty 
in the French army ; that had seven hundred 
and ten secretaries in the combat area in the 
Argonne drive, sixty-five of whom were 
women and more than five hundred of 
whom were under continuous shell fire; 
twelve of whose secretaries were killed, 



74 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CROSS 

ninety-seven gassed or wounded, and one 
hundred and twenty decorated, cited, or 
honourably mentioned. 

Neither is the joking tendency of the 
doughboy the indication of a lamb-like 
nature. He is anything but docile in battle. 
I have been told that there is no more brutal 
fighter than he when he gets into the game. 
He is merciless and uses cold steel with an 
abandon that speedily made him a terror to 
the Hun. But he does not carry his savage 
mood away with him from the battle-field. 
You will never find him committing wanton 
atrocities on helpless women and children, 
or roughly trampling on the rights of 
civilians. The German women were amazed 
that soldiers who were so fierce in the 
trenches could be so gentle in the billets. 
They knew what their own men had done 
to the women of Belgium and France, and 
at first they looked for reprisals on the part 
of the soldiers in the Army of Occupation. 
They feared for their daughters and tried to 
shield them. They soon discovered that 
their fears were groundless, and when they 



GEEEN APPLES AND ARMY CHOW 76 

asked for an explanation of the courteous at- 
titude of the doughboy towards the women 
of a conquered nation, they were told that 
the mothers of America did not bring up 
their sons to wage war on women. 

The doughboy is not a vandal even when 
it comes to property. When some one 
argued that certain acts of salvage for the 
sake of souvenirs were justifiable because of 
what the Kaiser had done, one of these 
doughboys protested, saying, " It is not for 
us to become like him." 

Neither are we to conclude that the light 
moods of our soldier boys mean that they 
lack depth. They have their serious hours 
also, and often the smile and the tear touch 
each other. 

" I wish you'd drop around to see Mother 
once in a while," wrote a soldier to his pal. 
" She writes fine, smiling letters, but some- 
how I have a feeling that she is hiding a lot 
of tears. Tell her I'm all right, and make 
her believe it" 

Another, seriously wounded, said, "I've 
been a sort of wanderer for the last six 



76 THE SILVER ON THE lEON CEOSS 

years. I guess the folks thought that I was 
good for nothing. But now I wish you 
would write Mother for me and just tell her 
that I made good." 

Yet these same men made a joke of 
danger. In an air raid on Nancy, October 
31, 1918, sixty bombs were dropped on the 
town in an hour and ten minutes. Search- 
lights began to play and air guns covered 
the city from all sides. Many buildings 
were struck and the next day the Red Cross 
cared for one hundred and twenty wounded. 
Instead of seeking cover, the doughboys 
rushed to the public square to enjoy the fire- 
works. 

One who was in the Cht\teau Thierry 
drive says that he saw eighteen hundred 
of our men lying dead on that field, and 
every man had a smile on his face. 

What is all this but saying that the Amer- 
ican soldier is the finest ever? You cannot 
beat him. Take him all in all, he ranks the 
men in any age who have jeopardized life for 
a noble cause. He has brought the flag 
back home with an added glory. There is 



GEEEN APPLES AND AEMY CHOW 77 

an added glory in the red of the flag be- 
cause of the blood our soldiers have spilled 
on the field of battle ; there is an added glory- 
in the white of the flag because of the white 
motive which has animated them in the 
war; there is an added glory in the blue of 
the flag because they have made every 
march and fight an affair of honour; and 
there is an added glory in the stars of the 
flag because of the stars which have changed 
from blue to gold as they have carried " Old 
Glory " through the smoke of battle to 
victory. 

They deserve the best. The nation to 
whose call they rallied, and whose traditions 
they have honoured and enriched, cannot do 
too much for them, cannot expect too much 
of them. In the new day that is dawning 
for America and mankind, they will be 
found to respond to the call of duty with 
the same alacrity, to face the trying and 
difficult with the same serenity, and to 
achieve their objective with the same reck- 
less disregard of self. They are not super- 
men, they are just men, but they are men! 



IX 

A TESTAMENT OR A BOTTLE OF WINE 

WITH a bundle under my arm con- 
taining two dozen Testaments, 
I was on my way to the " Uncle 
Sam Theatre," where I was preaching every 
night to the soldiers. Two doughboys 
stopped me and one asked, " What is in that 
bundle— cigarettes ? " " No," I said, " Testa- 
ments. Would you like one?" "Testa- 
ments ! " he exclaimed, as a puzzled look 
came into his face. " No, thank you; but if 
you have a bottle of wine, I'll take that." 
On reaching the waiting room, behind the 
stage, at the theatre, I related the incident 
to a dozen soldiers who were leading the 
singing at our meetings. " Well," said one 
of them, " he was at least no hypocrite." 

He named one of the cardinal character- 
istics of the doughboy's creed. He will not 
stand for camouflage when it comes to re- 
ligion. It must be the real thing or noth- 

78 



A TESTAMENT OR A BOTTLE OF WINE 79 

ing. He detests deceit, and scorns insin- 
cerity. 

A show followed our meeting one night, 
in which two ladies with a blazing colour in 
their cheeks, artificially achieved, were the 
chief performers. " How did you enjoy the 
show? " I said to the soldier who was driv- 
ing our car. " I did not go in," he rather 
curtly replied. " I don't care for a woman 
who is camouflaged." 

There has been considerable speculation 
as to what effect the war has had on the 
soldier in his attitude to religion. As I 
went through the camps, one duty assigned 
me was the holding of informal conferences 
with different groups of soldiers to ascer- 
tain what they were thinking about Chris- 
tian experience, the organized church, the 
message of Christianity, and the duty of the 
church to society in its economic, industrial, 
and political aspects. These conferences, 
while they revealed a wide diversity of 
views, disclosed a remarkable unanimity on 
the main issues involved. 

They showed that the men back home, 



80 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

who had been telling us that the soldier was 
coming back to smash the church and re- 
pudiate religion, had not sensed the situa- 
tion. Indeed these conferences indicated 
that the doughboy has no iconoclastic in- 
tentions concerning the church. He wishes 
no radical changes. He will have no 
patience with sectarianism and intolerance; 
but the church he wants to find when he 
gets home is the old home church, with the 
hymns he used to sing, and the faces of the 
home-folks around him, and the God he has 
not forgotten still filling the place with the 
glory of His presence. 

There was much in these conferences to 
indicate that the doughboy is returning 
from the war more religious than he went. 
In his conduct he has often been less moral; 
but in his convictions and conscious need 
he is more religious. This seems contra- 
dictory, but is not. Many a soldier who 
thought he was a Christian found in the 
army that he was mistaken, that his religion 
was only a conventional veneer. But many 
have found Christ in the army, and many, 



A TESTAMENT OR A BOTTLE OP WOE 81 

many more have discovered that their faith 
has not only stood the stern test, but has 
come out of the struggle stronger. 

War brings out the best and the worst. 
If a man is yellow, the army soon shows 
him yellow; and if he is white, it shows him 
white. If his religion has been a cult, it 
speedily goes to the devil, but if his ex- 
perience of God has been vital, the war chal- 
lenge proves that the " trial of faith " is still 
precious. 

"Has your religion stood the test?" I 
said to a fine young marine from my own 
congregation. He had been in all the fight- 
ing where the famous Sixth Regiment had 
fought. " Yes, it has grown stronger," he 
said. " When we went into the fight at 
Chateau Thierry, I found myself on my 
knees. God came to me then, and He has 
never left me." 

" Going over the top brought me to 
Christ," said another. 

Numbers of these men, under the most 
trying conditions, have not faltered in their 
devotion to Christ. In the army, they have 



82 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CROSS 

shown what it means to be a Christian man. 
And they were not namby-pamby soldiers 
either. The best fighters in our army, they 
say, were not the loud talkers and bar-room 
brawlers, but what we call at home " the 
Sunday-school boys," fellows who shrank 
from killing a chicken, but who cleaned up 
Fritzy in a jiffy. 

One night in Le Mans in a hut crowded 
with standing soldiers, I listened to a talk 
from the Division General. It was one of 
the most famous combat divisions in the 
army, having gone in with the British first, 
and fought through. The General said to 
his men : " Our division has done so well be- 
cause it is largely composed of Christian 
men." 

One of the most stirring stories of per- 
sonal exploit in the war is that of York, a 
tall, red-headed East Tennessee moun- 
taineer, who, single-handed, took one hun- 
dred and thirty-one Prussian prisoners and 
marched them back of the lines, leaving 
twenty-five men dead on the field whom he 
had killed with his automatic. He was a 



A TESTAMENT OR A BOTTLE OF WINE 83 

man who at first had been unwilling to enlist 
because he had conscientious scruples 
against killing people, but he prayed the 
thing through. The General who cited 
York for his almost miraculous achieve- 
ment asked him how he did it. " I did not 
do it, General," he replied. " It was God 
Who did it." 

At Chaumont de Bois I found a Bible 
class composed of soldiers that met every 
night after mess. They were studying the 
New Testament, with Captain J. as their 
leader. Beginning with St. Matthew's Gos- 
pel, they had reached the concluding chap- 
ter of the Epistle to the Romans on the 
evening I met with them. 

The soldier is not pious but he is re- 
ligious. Two of them had been arguing 
about belief in Jesus Christ. The argument 

closed with this emphatic statement made 
by one of them: "Any man is a damn fool 
who does not believe in Jesus Christ." 

In a certain hut the men were asked 
whether they wanted " movies " or to hear 
about Jesus Christ. One of them cried out. 



84 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

"To hell with the movies! Give us Jesus 
Christ." Night after night I have seen 
these men pack the huts, often more than a 
hundred of them standing throughout the 
entire service, drawn there to hear the Gos- 
pel preached. I have seen them break into 
applause at the close of a simple Gospel 
sermon. 

" It was just what I needed," said a soldier 
as he shook hands with me one morning at 
the close of a communion Service. The 
highest courage on the battle-field was not 
produced by alcohol, but by the quiet faith 
of men who believed in the reality of God's 
presence. 

And the profanity and sometimes immo- 
rality of these men was not always to be 
taken as an evidence that they were in- 
different to religion. The doughboy's re- 
ligion is sincere and practical. The preacher 
who becomes metaphysical or theological 
will see the boys walk out, and they will 
not stand on the order of their going. His 
religion is also heroic, and it is preeminently 
altruistic. He is heroic as a matter of 



A TESTAMENT OE A BOTTLE OP WINE 86 

course. Some one told me of a sergeant he 
found sitting out in " No Man's Land," 
His leg had been shot off and he was 
philosophically tearing up his shirt and ty- 
ing up his wounds to keep from bleeding to 
death. His heroism is also altruistic. If 
there is one thing in religion the doughboy 
accepts, it is the doctrine of sacrifice and 
service. He scorns " the guy " who tries to 
better his own lot to the disadvantage of a 
comrade; and he takes it as a matter of 
course to lend a hand. A Y man told me of 
a soldier he saw whose eyeball had been 
shot out and was hanging on his cheek. 
Coolly he lighted a cigarette and began 
smoking. Seeing a wounded Boche prisoner 
lying near, he reached down and lighted the 
Hun's cigarette from his own. 

These are the men who have fought for 
us and we may rest easy that the sanctities 
of life are safe with them. Religion is not 
likely to be hurt by these gentle, brave spirits 
who have fought the most unselfish crusade 
for which men have ever adventured life. 
Womanhood, childhood, family life, home. 



86 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

the church, the Bible, all that faith cher- 
ishes — is safe with them. 

A Y girl told me of how she had spent a 
lonely night in a box car by the roadside. 
She had served two thousand cups of 
chocolate that day in the front trenches. 
She had been caught in a barrage fire and 
the car in which she came having been 
deserted by its driver, she had to walk back 
alone. She came upon a group of dough- 
boys and they found a box car. The boys 
slept on one side of the car and she on the 
other, and she slept without fear. 

They may not always be conventional iri 
their attitude to religion. They may ask 
for a bottle of wine when you offer them a 
Testament; but they are not hypocrites. 
They are free of the sin Christ hit hardest 
when He was here on earth. They are sin- 
cere, and they have practiced the creed 
which teaches that " as Christ laid down His 
life for us, so ought we to lay down our lives 
for the brethren." 

The church has nothing to fear but every- 
thing to hope from such men. "And that 



A TESTAMENT OE A BOTTLE OF WINE 87 

he liked best of all," as Mary Carolyn Davies 
says, " the feeling that one was part, at last, 
after one's puny life, of something vast." 

One day in the hospital at Le Mans, I sat 
beside a soldier who in a few days was to 
answer the final roll call. " Is Christ with 
you? " I asked. " How can He be with me, 
when I have not been with Him?" Then 
he added, ** But when I get home, I am go- 
ing to seek Him." I told him he need not 
wait, but that He Who " stands at the door 
and knocks " was seeking him. Before I 
left him he had found Christ and peace. 

Then another day, on the slope of a hill 
just outside Aucy le Franc, I stood by the 
grave and conducted the service, as the sol- 
diers lowered to its final rest the body of a 
dead comrade. I knew little of the lad's 
life, but he was one of our boys, and, as taps 
were sounded and the soldiers down the 
hillside and along the white road stood at 
attention, I felt the lad must have met Him 
Whom soldiers are not less brave for wor- 
shipping as "the Captain of their Salva- 
tion." 



X 

INTERNATIONALISM AT NEVERS 

IT was a sunny Sunday afternoon in 
sunny France, a combination not al- 
ways easy of achievement. A Y hut 
was to be dedicated and the affair, as you 
will soon see, was to be international in 
character and, let us hope, also in results. 

It was at Nevers, where six hundred 
Russian soldiers were on duty under the 
French military authorities. These were 
not prisoners but heroes of war. They be- 
longed to that contingent of the Russian 
army which, in the early period of the war, 
came by the North Sea to fight on the West 
Front. They were as stalwart looking as 
any soldiers that muster under any flag. 
They had given a good account of them- 
selves, and a number of them were deco- 
rated with the Russian cross or medal of 

88 



INTERNATIONALISM AT NEVERS 89 

honour, some with both ; and some with the 
Croix de Guerre. 

Under the leadership of Dr. S., the Y. M. 
C. A. director of reHgious work in the area, 
and with the consent of the French officials, 
a Y work had been undertaken for these 
Russian soldiers. They had shown such 
keen appreciation of the work, which de- 
veloped rapidly, that a large hall had been 
secured and furnished in connection with 
the barracks, and this hall, on this sunny 
Sunday afternoon, was to be formally dedi- 
cated. 

A committee of soldiers, under the lead 
of the secretary, Private A., came to escort 
us to the hall. They were handsome in 
Russian uniforms, and their decorations 
ghstened and shone in the sunHght. 

The six hundred were Greek CathoHcs, 
Roman Catholics, and Jews ; and Private A. 
was a Russian Jew who, during twelve years' 
residence on the East Side in New York 
City, had absorbed Americanism. He had 
been detailed from the army for this work. 
Speaking half a dozen languages, keen, 



90 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

patriotic, and tolerant, he was admirably 
fitted for his difficult position. 

On reaching the building, the first func- 
tion was one of photography. The men 
poured out of their barracks, the cameras 
were snapped, and then the order was given 
to proceed to the hall. 

Picture a hall packed with standing men 
on whose faces one, with only a little 
imagination, might read the tragedies and 
hopes, the struggles and defeats of a nation 
that still is in the womb of time. 

On the platform were the French com- 
manding officer. Lieutenant G. ; two Russian 
officers. Colonel J. and Captain D. ; and the 
speakers. It was France, Russia, and 
America, — three countries with an undying 
passion for freedom. 

Russian hymns were sung — weird, full of 
melody and feeling. We Americans could 
not understand the words, but we could feel 
the accents of the heart as the songs broke 
on the lips of these sons of Russia far from 
the land which they still called home. As 
we listened, it seemed to us that the hymns 



INTEENATIONALISM AT NEVEES 91 

breathed pathos and hope, longing and 
daring. We felt that a country which could 
produce such melodies must some day leave 
discord behind it. 

The French official welcomed us. Dr. S. 
responded, and then the two ministers from 
America, Dr. McA. and the writer, were in- 
troduced. We were interpreted by Private 
A. We tried to carry to that group of Rus- 
sian soldiers the greetings of the great Re- 
public of the West. We told them that 
America and Russia were both great in 
territory, in population and in a passion for 
freedom; that freedom in America was not 
equality but fraternity, not equality of posi- 
tion or possession, but of opportunity; not 
freedom to tear down but to build up; not 
freedom to hurt but to help. We described 
to them the things on which American 
democracy was founded, the home, the 
school, the state, and the church. We 
tried to make them understand how America 
is a nation with an international heart-beat 
by reason of the very life of her citizens, 
drawn as they are from every nationality; 



92 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

of how America reaches over into France 
and puts a little of France into her blood, 
and then into Great Britain and puts a little 
of the Briton into her blood, and then into 
Scandinavia and Germany and the Orient, 
and dissolves all these in the making of an 
American citizen, until the beat of the race- 
kin becomes so strong that he must push his 
boat out of provincial waters and sail world 
seas with a concern for humanity. We told 
them that America had not lost faith in 
Russia, and that our people were stretching 
hands across the seas to strike hands with 
Russia in the effort to achieve this kind of 
freedom, not only for Russia, but for all man- 
kind. They not only cheered to the echo 
what we said, but their hearts flamed in 
their faces with a look that had the night in 
it but also the morning. 

Then something took place which is not 
on the conventional dedication program in 
Y huts. It was, I suppose, Russian, although 
it may have been also international. At 
the request of the Russian colonel, two of 
the soldiers came forward, a space was 



INTEENATIONALISM AT NEVEES 93 

cleared, a violinist began to play a Russian 
air, and an exhibition of Russian dancing 
was given that would have made Pavlowa 
jealous. 

The staid Presbyterian ministers from 
America looked on, but somehow we could 
not rally enough of our traditions to feel 
shocked, and, when the dance ended, we 
caught ourselves among the most vociferous 
applauders for an encore. 

It was at the close of the dancing that the 
French officer arose and gave the final touch 
which sent the good-will of the crowd to 
fever heat. 

It seemed that Russian soldiers, like 
their French and American comrades, some- 
times do things which land them in the 
guard house. It was so at Nevers, and a 
number of the men had been kept from the 
meeting because they were languishing in 
durance vile. 

The French officer said that as an ex- 
pression of his appreciation of what the Y 
was doing, he would pardon all offenders 
and empty the guard house. Then the 



94 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

shouts cracked the roof. Calling for pen 
and paper, the French officer wrote the 
order, and a sergeant was hurried from the 
hall to execute it, in time for the discharged 
prisoners to partake of the chocolate and 
sandwiches served at the close of the meet- 
ing. 

The men in that hall that evening will not 
return to Russia as a peril either to France 
or America. They will not go back with 
hate in their breasts, to pillage and burn. 
They will not turn to arson and murder for 
a method of civilization. When they go, 
every man will go as an ambassador of 
good-will to tell Russia that the freedom she 
must have is not license but liberty, not the 
freedom of lust but of love, not the freedom 
that destroys but builds. 

The Russian problem — how is it to be 
solved? Statesmen are pestered and sol- 
diers are perplexed. May not the evan- 
gelists of love have a solution? 

" Fold the banners, 
Smelt the guns; 
Love rules, 
Her gentle purpose runs." 



INTEENATIONALISM AT NEVERS 96 

There are eight hundred thousand Rus- 
sian prisoners released by Germany for re- 
construction work in France. Would it 
help to spread the incident at Nevers and do 
for the eight hundred thousand what is be- 
ing done for the six hundred? Suppose 
these Russians, during their sojourn in 
France, could be given some adequate idea 
of what American freedom is, and of the 
things on which American democracy is 
founded, would they not likely become the 
harbingers of a new day for their troubled 
fatherland? It would be something to send 
an army of two million American soldiers 
into Russia to see what force can do in 
bringing order out of chaos— but a cross 
still lifts on the world's far horizon, and, 
from the life of One Who died to make men 
free, the watchers for the dawn may hear: 
"A new commandment give I unto you, 
That ye love one another." 



XI 

THE HOUSE OF PEACE IN THE CRATER 
OF WAR 

TWO things took me to Verdun, — a 
grave and a church; a grave that 
spoke of death and a church that 
speaks of immortaUty. It was hard to take 
our eyes off the ghastly ruins of the old 
town long enough to look for anything. 
There at Verdun, the Hun did his worst and 
the French their best. Nine hundred thou- 
sand men lost by the Germans and seven 
hundred thousand by the French, tell the 
tale of the great war's greatest battle. Had 
Verdun fallen, it would have signalled to the 
world that Germany had won the war. But 
Verdun stood. Only two of her thirty-six 
forts, Douaumont and Vaux, were occupied 
by the foe. But the destruction wrought 

baffles description. 

96 



THE HOUSE OF PEACE 97 

We started out to look for the little Re- 
formed Church in the shell-shot city. The 
men of my own congregation back in the 
States had become interested in it and were 
proposing to contribute a fund for its res- 
toration and maintenance. I wanted to 
visit our parish overseas and tell the men 
back home something about their work in 
Verdun. 

We passed the great Cathedral, whose 
gaunt walls were a grim skeleton of ruins, 
and whose tottering towers were marked 
with danger signs and forbidden the visitor. 
We went through street after street of 
ruined homes. It seemed as if there was 
scarcely a house in Verdun that had not 
been smashed by the almost ceaseless can- 
nonading of four years. 

At last we found our little church, stand- 
ing on the Rue de Riviere. On either side 
of it the houses had been knocked to pieces, 
but the church was standing almost un- 
harmed. A shell had made a hole in the 
roof, and we were told that the organ inside 
was badly damaged; but the church itself 



98 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CROSS 

stood, as though some invisible garrison had 
guarded it from harm. 

Over the entrance, the image of the open 
Bible was carved into the stone. The place 
where the Book lay open was marked by a 
palm branch, the Bible's symbol of peace. 
On one page of the open book was the 
Greek letter Alpha and on the other page 
Omega. 

Beneath the Bible, on the stone arch, was 
" /. C, Le Chemin, La Verife, La Vie" — " Jesus 
Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life." Then 
across the door itself, in gilt letters, was this 
marvellous message to be still standing on 
the door of a house in that shell-shot town : 
" La Paix Soit Avec Vous" I read it and 
looked around upon the ruins — " Peace be 
with you ! " 

How it seemed to sing and shout itself 
out from the door of that little Reformed 
Church! How it seemed to shout its de- 
fiance at the bursting shells and fling its 
challenge in the face of all that dreadful war 
had tried to do in that crater of flame and 
death ! How it seemed to float like a bene- 



THE HOUSE OP PEACE 99 

diction over the troubled, stricken city, and 
bid the poor souls left creep out from be- 
hind those piles of crumbling stones and 
hope and look for a better day ! 

" Peace be with you ! " All the shells of the 
great armies of the Crown Prince had not 
been able to shoot it from the church door. 

How weak war is! It cannot touch the 
real things of life. It can storm and flame, 
but there is a peace whose serenity it is 
powerless to disturb. The unseen forces 
are the mightiest. 

As I stood before the little church and 
read its greeting to all who paused to wor- 
ship, I thought of the thirty-six great forti- 
fications that ringed Verdun with their de- 
fenses, and of the million trained men 
thrown in to hold the town ; but I felt that 
there was something represented by that 
little church which, in the making of history 
and the building of civilization, was mightier 
than all forts and armies. 

Peace be with you ! From the life of the 
only real Conqueror the world has ever 
known, that message pours down the ages. 



100 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

Never a life so storm-set as His, and yet 
never a life so serene. The world did its 
utmost to batter down and destroy His 
peace, but when He left it, the one thing 
He had to bequeath to His followers was 
" peace." " Peace I leave with you, my 
peace I give unto you." Standing there on 
the street of the ruined town, it seemed to 
me that what men most need is not war but 
peace; not the peace made by war but the 
peace made by surrender; not simply the 
peace worked out by a group of diplomats 
around a peace table in Paris, but the peace 
which comes when man lays down his arms 
against God. It is a hollow victory that 
lets a man plough his fields and herd his 
cattle unmolested, but that leaves him at 
war with his heavenly Father. Poor is he 
and perilous his condition, whose peace can 
only be maintained by force of arms. Hap- 
piness and real security come not until there 
settles about us " the peace of God which 
passeth all understanding " and which is 
pledged to " garrison our hearts and minds 
in Christ Jesus." 



THE HOUSE OF PEACE 101 

This is what that church which had sur- 
vived the ruin of war in battered Verdun 
seemed to be saying to the old town. 

Verdun will be rebuilt, but how? Al- 
ready it is rebuilding, and the spirit that lays 
its hand to such a task is magnificent. But 
is the Verdun of the future to be merely a 
fort? Is it to build up again what some 
future kaiser's war hordes may destroy? 
If so, it builds but for a day. " There is a 
city that hath foundations whose builder 
and maker is God.*' The city that war 
cannot destroy is one fashioned after the 
city John saw " coming down from God out 
of heaven." It is a city whose defenses are 
in the character of its people. Let Verdun 
level its medieval walls, and come out of its 
underground corridors, and melt its guns 
into the tools of industry, if it would build a 
city safe and strong. 

And the message to Verdun is the same 
for France. The day is past for men to seek 
in war the way to glory. If the four years 
of blood and death through which we have 
passed can teach us anything, it would seem 



102 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

to be the folly of seeking to found civiliza- 
tion on war. 

If France is to become a greater nation ; if 
she is to escape the perils which threatened 
her before the war, as well as build up into 
enduring greatness out of the war, she must 
hearken to the things which are represented 
by the House of Peace in the Crater of War, 
over whose portal those who enter may still 
read: "Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, 
and the Life." 

The lesson is for a larger audience than 
France. It is for all men. We are longing 
for a peace that will abide. We would drive 
war forever from the earth. But how is war 
permanently to be put out of business? A 
League of Nations is good as far as it goes, 
but a League of Nations based on what? 
War worships force. Is it likely that a 
League of Nations whose authority is to be 
maintained by force will put war out of busi- 
ness? Something besides an international 
police force is needed. The world is freer 
than it has ever been; but as outward re- 
straints are broken, inward restraints must 



THE HOUSE OF PEACE 103 

be established. As men are less and less 
controlled, they must more and more learn 
to control themselves. How is this to be 
accomplished? The answer takes us to the 
church door in Verdun, and bids men sit at 
the feet of Him Who said, " Peace be with 
you." 

Not until He has His way with men ; not 
until His teachings have become the practice 
of individuals and nations; not until the 
golden rule He brought to our weary world 
has become our standard for all of lifers 
relations, will the world have permanent 
rest from war. 

It is not an idle dream to hope that all 
this may come to pass. As well try to tie 
the rising sun down to the sky-Hne with a 
rope of sand, as well try to halt the tides of 
the sea by shouting at its waves, as to keep 
the Prince of Peace from His throne in the 
heart of humanity. " Peace be with you ! " 
He said it, and the day will come, for " the 
government shall be upon his shoulder," 
and " of the increase of his government and 
peace there shall be no end." 



104 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

In the battered, shell-shot Cathedral at 
Soissons, whose walls and spire are wrecked 
beyond the possibility of restoration, we 
found uninjured a wonderful picture of 
" The Great Supper." Serenely from the 
canvas the faces of the Christ and His dis- 
ciples were looking out on that scene around 
them of the ruin wrought by war. The un- 
marred picture of the Eucharist seemed to 
speak of things which war cannot kill. They 
are the treasures the world must claim if 
it would bid successful defiance to the forces 
that destroy. 



XII 

THE ChAtEAU at CLAYE 

THE attention of visitors in Claye is 
called to a small chateau which 
stands near the roadside, and which 
has nothing to attract attention save the fact 
that one day a man sitting in a room of the 
house said something that has gone round 
the world and will live forever, 

Claye is a dozen miles from Paris on the 
road to Chateau Thierry. In the early days 
of September, 1914, the town was aquiver 
with excitement, and the faces of the people 
were full of fear. The Germans were thun- 
dering in on Paris. Less than a month be- 
fore I had left Paris, but there was no fear 
then that the pride of France was in serious 
peril of falling into the hands of the Hun. 
The people were alive to the seriousness of 
the war, but they were not hysterical. 
There was every confidence in the outcome. 

105 



106 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

With quiet and grim determination the peo- 
ple set themselves to the task which, since 
the days of '71, they had seen; and with 
patriotic alacrity the sons of France had re- 
sponded to the call to the colours. 

But the unexpected had happened. With 
incredible swiftness, the German Army had 
driven through Belgium, and into France. 
German strategy had outwitted the original 
plan of the French Staff, which was to strike 
the foe beyond the Rhine. Retirement fol- 
lowed retirement at the speed of from thirty 
to forty kilometres a day; and September 
first found the French at Claye and the Ger- 
mans at Meaux, the next town beyond. In- 
deed the Germans came closer to Paris than 
Meaux, for some of their patrols entered the 
town of Claye itself. It looked as if Paris 
was doomed, and seemed that the war, so 
dramatically timed by the Kaiser, would 
quickly end in victory for the war lord. 
There is a legend that he was waiting some- 
where on a Belgian hill with a goodly com- 
pany of the Prussian Guard in full dress uni- 
form, all ready for a spectacular entry into 



THE CHItEAU at CLAYE 107 

Paris. Those were dark days for the cause 
of freedom. 

In the chateau at Claye, on the night of 
September first, sat a man with a square 
jaw and no look of fear in his face. He 
could wait, but he could strike, too, when he 
had waited long enough. From the room 
in the little chateau of Claye, hard by the 
roadside, that fateful September night, Gen- 
eral Jofifre issued his famous order : " They 
shall not pass ! " — " lis ne passeront pas! " 

Then things began to happen. The 
allied line stiffened like steel, and the Ger- 
mans met a resistance in which the French 
fought like demons. To his troops General 
Joffre said: "At the moment when a battle 
begins on which the fate of this country de- 
pends, every man must be reminded that the 
time is past for looking behind ; every effort 
must bear on attacking and driving back the 
enemy. When a unit can no longer ad- 
vance, it must keep at all costs the ground 
gained, and die where it stands, rather than 
fall back. In the present circumstances, no 
flinching can be tolerated." The next morn- 



108 THE SILYEE ON THE IRON CROSS 

ing fighting of the most atrocious kind be- 
gan. Gallieni, the Governor of Paris, 
emptied the city of its garrison to strengthen 
Joffre's Hne. On the nights of September 
sixth and seventh, strange things were hap- 
pening on the road from Paris to Claye. A 
thousand taxi-cabs, each filled v^ith soldiers 
armed to the teeth and ready to die for 
country, were speeding through the dark- 
ness to the battle front. For seven days 
the savage fighting lasted. The Hun did 
not pass. The foe was thrown back routed 
and in confusion. Paris was saved. The 
war was to go on until the last seat of 
autocracy should crumble and fall. 

It was a glorious victory. No wonder the 
visitor pauses as he passes through Claye, 
and views with profound interest the little 
chateau from which issued the order that 
changed history. 

Is this all? Have we come to the real 
explanation of the victory in that first bat- 
tle of the Marne? There cannot be given 
too much praise to French strategy and 
valour; but are we to stop there in our 



THE CHATEAU AT CLAYE 109 

diagnosis of the forces which changed seem- 
ingly certain defeat into victory ? 

Careful investigation has discovered that 
other things worked confusion to the Hun. 
Had he kept on instead of halting at Meaux, 
there is reason to believe that nothing could 
have kept him from marching into Paris. 
Why did he not keep on? It is said that 
the German generals were awaiting the ar- 
rival of the Crown Prince, who was to ride 
at the head of his victorious army into the 
vanquished city. For three days they 
waited, but these three days gave Joffre 
time to prepare. The vanity of the Hohen- 
zollern fought for the French. 

Investigation has also brought out the 
fact that the German Army had surrendered 
itself to an orgy of drunkenness, and these 
intoxicated soldiers were unfit for efficient 
service. Extracts from the diary of a stafif 
lieutenant in Von Kluck's army, found on a 
prisoner, describe this. He says, speaking 
of the German soldiers : " The certainty of 
instant victory and a triumphant entry into 
Paris keeps their nerves taut. But for that 



110 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

certainty, they would drop from exhaustion, 
and lie down wherever they happened to 
be, so as to sleep at last anywhere and any- 
how. . . . It is the ecstasy of victory 
that keeps the men alive; but in order to 
make their bodies as light as their souls, 
they drink to excess. The drink, too, helps 
them to keep their legs. To-day the Gen- 
eral, after an inspection, has gone mad with 
rage. He wanted to stop this collective 
drunkenness. We have just dissuaded him 
from extreme measures. We must not be 
too harsh, else the men would cease to move 
on. Such abnormal fatigue makes abnor- 
mal excitement indispensable. Once in 
Paris, we will stop it all. No alcohol once 
we are there. Order will return when we 
rest on our laurels." 

This was written on September second. 
The next day he wrote : " Our men are not 
aware that we have left, for the time being, 
the road to Paris. They are so sure of 
being at the gates of Paris to-morrow or 
the next day that it would be cruel to tell 
them the truth. They believe that the 



THE CHATEAU AT CLAYE 111 

period of fighting is over, that the French 
Army is destroyed and in hiding, and that 
we are going to enter Paris singing and 
drinking. 

" I have been about the forest in a motor- 
car behind our armies. The sight is awful ; 
the French guns have opened bloody gaps 
in our ranks. The road is strewn with 
bodies in heaps. Dead bodies, thousands 
of empty tins, and millions of empty bottles 
— such is the jetsam left by the flood of our 
army." 

The vices of the German soldier fought 
for the French. It was not the first time 
that the wickedness of men has been made 
to serve a righteous cause. There is an old 
story that comes to us across the pages of 
Holy Writ, of another army encamping near 
a city whose doom it sought, surrendered to 
a night of revelry and drunkenness. The 
next morning they were all " dead corpses." 

The victory of the French that first week 
in September of 1914 was not accidental. 
It was more than the result of miHtary 
prowess. It was predestined. Strange 



112 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

stories are told of supernatural sights that 
were seen and miraculous help that was 
given. One may explain as he will; but 
the careful student of events will find it hard 
to explain the first battle of the Marne with- 
out an " Unseen Hand." Not only in the 
chateau at Claye was a determined man say- 
ing it, but from His throne in the heavens 
the Power That rules the world was saying: 
" They shall not pass." 

What was true of that battle is char- 
acteristic of the whole war. Repeatedly 
there have been times when nothing earthly 
stood between Germany and victory. All 
that the Hun needed to do was to march 
through. But for some strange reason, he 
did not. He hesitated, and lost. Why did 
a foe that could strike such swift and uner- 
ring blows blunder and fumble at the 
strategic moment? 

God has been in this war from the start. 
The ultimate outcome has never been in real 
jeopardy. Too many things have hap- 
pened at the psychological moment for 
doubt to challenge the reality of unseen 



THE CHlTEAU AT CLAYE 113 

allies. Was it an accident that the Piave 
came to its flood just at the time when the 
river was needed to fight for Italy? 

The war has ended with victory for the 
forces that were fighting for freedom and 
humanity, not because French surpassed 
Teuton strategy, not because the soldiers 
of the Allies were better trained and more 
courageous than those they opposed, but 
because, back of events in this world, there 
is a Power that eternally and resistlessly 
makes for world betterment. 

" Right forever on the scaflFoId, 
Wrong forever on the throne ; 
But that scaffold rules the future, 
And behind the dark unknown, 
Standeth God amid the shadows. 
Keeping watch above His own." 

The world will be stupid if it forgets this. 
France has had enough to call her back to 
religion. God is giving the nation that put 
Him aside a new day of opportunity. Will 
France see it and shake off her materialism 
and sensuality, and give her allegiance to 
the Truth that makes men free? 



114 THE SILVEE ON THE IRON CROSS 

In the early weeks of the armistice, the 
people who thronged the streets which 
centre about the entrance to the Madeleine, 
the pride of Paris, saw a great sign over the 
church door, on which was painted this 
message: 

" Venite Adoremus." 

That is the supreme lesson of the war. 
That is the message of victory to France. 
That is the call of God to men across the 
sodden fields of the slain and the cemeteries 
where rest the bodies of our soldier dead. 

A new world order is to be established, a 
new civilization is to be built ; but it will not 
be done by people who repudiate God. The 
blasphemer is not a social asset. This is no 
time for negations. What the world needs 
is faith, the vision of clear-eyed souls who 
see the unseen. 

Venite Adoremus 1 



XIII 
IN THE GERMAN CHURCH AT NEUWIED 

AT eight-thirty A. M. I had attended 
the chaplain's service in the German 
church at Neuwied; at three-thirty 
P. M. I preached in the same church to a 
congregation composed largely of Ameri- 
can soldiers, but at ten-thirty A. M. in this 
church I attended the German service and 
listened attentively to a sermon by the 
Lutheran pastor, in the German language, 
not a v^ord of which did I understand. 
Later, however, a synopsis of the sermon 
was given me by one who heard it and who 
did understand German. From what he 
told me, it was very much such a sermon 
as one might hear any Sunday in the aver- 
age American church. 

As I sat there in that German church, part 
of a congregation made up almost entirely 
of former subjects of the ex-Kaiser, and 

115 



116 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

took part with them, in so far as I could, 
in the worship of a common Saviour, strange 
feehngs came over me and I began to ask 
myself some searching and perplexing ques- 
tions. 

These people into whose church I had 
come, to the prayers and sermon of whose 
minister I was listening, in the music of 
whose hymns my own soul was rising to 
meet God, and in whose act of common 
worship I was a willing partaker, repre- 
sented to me all that was brutal and hateful. 

I could make no apology for the beastly 
conduct of the war on the part of the Hun, 
and I desired to make none. I thought of 
all the long catalogue of unspeakable out- 
rages the German soldiers had committed, 
of the infamies practiced on Belgium, of the 
bombing of school children, of the murder 
of Edith Cavel, of the sinking of the Lusi- 
tania, of the shells aimed at Red Cross hos- 
pitals, and of Germany's repudiation of 
every ethical principle in her conduct of the 
war. Again and again, with all the invec- 
tive I could muster, I had denounced all this 



THE CHUECH AT NEUWIED 117 

in my efforts to present our great cause to 
the people back home. And yet, there I 
sat as a part of a German congregation, 
worshipping with them, and myself to 
preach a few hours later, from that same 
pulpit, the same Gospel and the same 
Christ. 

Could these people in the church all be 
hypocrites? Were they feigning to sub- 
scribe outwardly to a religion which they 
inwardly repudiated? If so, there was no 
evidence of it in their faces. They looked 
devout, and seemed to be finding in the 
message of their minister and in the serv- 
ices of their church strength and comfort 
for the duties and trials of life. No, it 
would not be just to brand them with 
hypocrisy. 

There we were, coming up from two sides 
of a conflict as irreconcilable as heaven and 
hell, with the war not yet ended, with only 
the signing of an armistice making possible 
a peace hour in which we turned our faces to 
a common sanctuary, but coming together 
in mutual respect and adoration of that 



118 THE SILVER ON THE IRON CROSS 

which is stronger than death and hoUer than 
life. 

Did it mean that in face of the war, Ger- 
many and the AlHes still had something in 
common ? Was I to conclude that notwith- 
standing our irreconcilable differences in the 
war, there was still left something of a com- 
mon heritage, on which to begin to try to 
build again a house of brotherhood? Did 
that hour in the German church at Neuwied 
mean that God has made His children of 
such kind that, however far apart they may 
drift, there is always more that unites than 
divides? 

We read from the same Bible, we glorified 
the same Lord, we proclaimed the same sal- 
vation, and we looked by faith to the same 
eternal city. 

It is true the Kaiser's conception of God 
had seemed to me more pagan than Chris- 
tian, and I was not prepared to revise that 
estimate; but, as I looked around upon the 
quiet faces of that congregation of German 
people in the Lutheran Church, was there 
anything to justify an indictment of their 



THE CHURCH AT NETJWIED 119 

Christianity as a veneer of paganism? 
Might they not as easily lodge a railing ac- 
cusation against my religion as I against 
theirs? 

They say that the lines on the old Corin- 
thian columns, if projected high enough, will 
meet somewhere in the sky above us. Did 
not that hour in the church mean that there 
are racial lines in the common humanity of 
Saxon and Celt, of Teuton and Gaul, which, 
if projected high enough, will meet; if run 
up until they enter the atmosphere of God's 
presence, will be found to blend and become 
one? 

If this be true, then this broken world is 
not hopelessly and forever divided. The 
rent which war has torn in the garment of 
humanity may be mended, and hope may 
still lift its eyes and look for a day of recon- 
ciliation. ' 

Are we to regard such a possibility with 
disfavour? We can certainly never bring 
ourselves to have any but the sternest dis- 
approval and a loathing and disgust for the 
deeds of the Hun in his conduct of the war. 



120 THE SILVEE ON THE lEON CEOSS 

No specious pleas for racial unity, no senti- 
mental appeals on behalf of brotherhood and 
humanity, no skillful manipulation of the 
sanctities of religion can ever so mislead us 
as to incline us to gloss with tolerance those 
infamies. But are we to make up our minds 
to cherish hate forever? Is there never to 
be a reconciliation? The world is too small 
to keep up this fight. Every interest of 
mankind clamours for friendship. The 
wounds must be healed. The breach must 
be closed. We must get together. How? 
Where? 

As I sat there in the German church at 
Neuwied it seemed to me that we must be- 
gin where we had not yet separated — before 
the Cross on which our common Saviour 
had made the supreme sacrifice for us all. If 
it be true that He has not been alienated 
from us, that His love is changeless, that 
His concern is equal and abiding for all men, 
then we must let Him lead the way to recon- 
ciliation. 

What does this mean but that religion 
must mend the broken world, if the hospital 



THE CHUECH AT NEUWIED 121 

of our maimed and lamed comradeship is to 
be left behind? We must look beyond the 
selfish interests of commercialism ; we must 
turn to something more capable than states- 
manship and diplomacy; we must be cured 
forever of the fallacy that war is a virtue, if 
we are to find a sure and enduring road to 
internationalism. We must seek our path 
to fraternity amid those moods in human 
nature that are deepest, and make our ap- 
peal to those passions in the soul which are 
permanent and racial. We must take our 
problems where man meets God, and dis- 
covers that he and his fellows can never drift 
so far apart but they still hold a common 
lease on eternity. 

The war is over. Under the conditions 
which existed it was perhaps inevitable. It 
has accomplished its purpose. It has 
reached its objective. But the war is 
over. 

Now, not for war but for peace ! Now for 
the new day and the new world, which must 
not be a day of discord but a world whose 
law is love. 



122 THE SILVEE ON THE IRON CEOSS 

To help the world to such a day should be 
the task of all who love their fellow-men; 
for it has always been the task of Him Who 
loved us all and gave Himself for every 
man. 



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